Samsung Galaxy Z Flip Review By Best Buy Canada Product Videos

Hey teddy k here for the best buy blog and in this video review we take a look at a unique phone in the Samsung Galaxy zed flip a phone that hardens back to a bygone era, but tries to tackle it with more than a modern twist if you've been using phones long enough to remember what flip phones are like. The galaxy, Netflix or z flip, depending on where you live, is going to be a trip down memory lane to some degree at least Samsung wanted to experiment. Now. This is not the first foldable phone. We have the galaxy fold and full two that they've done, but this is the first flip phone. So as you can see it flips open like this.

Now this is experimental in many ways, and so there are things about it that work, and then there are things about it that don't, so we'll start with the design. So the design, of course, is a 6.7 inch, infinity flex AMOLED display. So it is Samsung screen technology. But there are a couple of caveats here: number one: it is glass underneath glass, apparently, that is so thin, is to be as thin as a human hair, but it's covered by a layer of plastic and that plastic is actually what you have contact with when you're touching the phone. The plastic is not what you typically notice or see, let's say in like an affordable or mid-range phone.

You know like that kind of hard in plastic. This part it's a little softer to the touch which actually leads to more friction when you're scrolling or swiping, not exactly intuitive, in what you would expect for a phone. It is different and, of course, because there's a hinge, you know that's the only way you can make this thing bend. There is a indent that you see in the middle of the screen that you, you kind of notice, really at any time like it's always there, regardless of what color is on the screen, whether it's just you know pure dark or it's all white, it's something that you'll, you'll see no matter what that screen and the hinge and everything involved has another element to it, which is that it is susceptible to fingerprints. So, unlike glass, which yeah I mean, glass has its fingerprints too, but of course, there's oleo phobic coating on screens generally to reduce that.

I don't know that that is that there's anything like that here, because I found that I was wiping this screen down a lot more often than I was with any glass screen. Moreover, is the fact that although Samsung pushes the screen all the way to the edges so that you don't have the situation like you had with the initial galaxy fold, you still have. I don't know what it is, but there just is a collection of dust. It just seems like whenever I leave the phone open. The dust seems to settle on this.

A little more than it does with glass, and I have a feeling it's because of the way the surface is so those are and yes, there's a screen protector and everything I mean you'll, see that there's like a layered screen protector on top, which of course is part of the plastic, so don't take that off uh when you see that but part of going with a design like this is also the functional perspective. So when you fold it closed, this tiny display is your only real look at what's coming in if you're used to using a phone like most people are where you get a notification. Something comes in. You quickly open your. You know, you just take your phone out of your pocket, and you look here.

Furthermore, you have very little real estate to look at what's coming in. So while you can see that a message or notification has come in, you don't really know the context of what it is in every case, which of course means you have to flip. It opens all the time flipping it open, though, because the hinge has some strength to it is not as simple as just as doing one of these movements. It won't flip open that way, you're usually going to have to use two hands to do it. That might seem like a minor gripe, but it's not I'm not, and I'm not really griping about it, just something that I've observed.

Having used this now for at least three months, where there's no way like I haven't, found a way to open this up and with one hand that works every time uh. Even though, and I love the hinge because it is strong, and it can prop up the phone very easily, so I mean pretty much at any angle. It's going to be fine, which is great, and that has some use cases that I'm going to get to. But it's something to consider if you are going to move to a phone like this, that it's not like the old flip phones that you can like flip open, you know and flip closed, and it doesn't really work that way. There's a couple other things! I should mention the design, so one is that there's no micro SD card slot, so there are 256 gigs of onboard storage that you can use, but you don't have a way to expand on that.

Unless you go onto the cloud and there is no headphone jack, but you probably expected that already, so you have to go wireless with any audio, and you have mystic bronze one of the main colors, which is, of course, is a carryover of a color that Samsung really rode with in 2020, and I think it makes the phone look very, very nice. So, depending on how you feel about the color, this is the primary one that I've seen from Samsung for this phone. I mentioned how you can prop up the phone like this and Samsung calls this flex mode. This has a functional purpose. So the idea being that if you had the phone like this, you would have controls here in the bottom, and then you'd be able to see whatever it is here on the top.

Not every app supports this. Some do that are important like YouTube, for example, or Samsung's camera app, but others don't. So if you wanted to sort of prop up the phone and have Netflix on or watch a hockey game or something like that, you're not going to be able to do that because the apps don't support it. So app developers have to sort of plug into that feature and to date I mean after a few months I have not seen a lot of that going on so instead, so while the feature is interesting, I mean you're using the camera and let's say you wanted to like you know: do a selfie or something very easy to do that using the camera app. But if you want to do that with the Zoom call, for example, or Microsoft Teams, or something like that, I have not really seen it work in flex mode, which is kind of a problem when you want to play up.

How useful that is. Split screen is another thing. So if you wanted to split the screen in two with one app and another, you can do that. It is fairly simple to do and can be useful, but again it does depend on if the app can support the feature or not, which is hit or miss a couple. Quick points about the camera as well.

The camera is okay, it is definitely not the best image sensors that Samsung has, so I would equate this camera more so with something in a higher mid-range, as opposed to anything flagship, and that shows in the photos which are going to be okay, but not generally great, especially compared to something, especially like the galaxy s21 ultra or something that's just come out. This isn't going to be as good as that, so the camera's passable it'll be all right, but given how expensive this phone is, you may feel a little changed as to what kind of camera performance you're getting. There is, of course, the convenience, as I mentioned that you know you can prop up the phone like this. You know put on a 90-degree angle or even any other angle and shoot whatever you want. You can do that, and it is very cool that you can do that, but at the same time it doesn't always work in landscape because well, you're shooting like this.

So I don't know. I've tried diff both ways, and I do like the flexibility pun intended for being able to shoot in ways where you can prop up the phone, especially for long exposures, but again the camera can only do so much. So it's a bit of a trade-off that functionally I can do this, but in terms of the output, not getting what I'd like so with everything going on battery life is actually quite good. It will last the full day per charge. I have no real issues as far as using it does support wireless charging, so you want to put it on a charging pad and charge up or fast charging by plugging in through USB.

Nowhere no issues there uh generally. This is not going to be a problem of problem phone when it comes to how long it lasts. Part of the reason for that, I think, is because the second screen is so small, so the second screen not really being big if it was like, which I suspect actually Samsung's going to do with the next version of this phone- will be a bigger sort of screen here to add more context or to make the screen actionable in some way. For example, you have the cameras here, so you would perhaps be able to use the camera as a way to do. Video calls without actually flipping the phone open again, not something you can do here, but something that I suspect Samsung might do with a future version of this phone.

But for now you can use it pretty. Well, I mean it is a very, very functional phone, but the novelty in this case is simply the fact that it flips there's not. There are a couple features that are related to the fact that it flips, but again that depends on what kind of support you can that is given to those things, rather than those things working with everything that you can do on the phone. So really what we're talking about here is, if you got past the novelty of this here, you're looking at a pretty basic phone, I mean you're, pretty you're looking at a phone. That does nothing really all that different from any other phone does.

So it really depends on you whether you're willing to pay and how much you're willing to pay for having something like this that nobody else really has well, except for maybe a couple companies and that's my review of the Samsung Galaxy zed flip for the best buy blog. I'm teddy k, thanks for watching.

Source : Best Buy Canada Product Videos